Saturday, October 25, 2008

In part One we had left the lady to enjoy the initial warmth of this city, so lets check on her and find out how comfortable the city has made her feel.

Oops, by the way I forgot to introduce her in the previous part (how rude!!…I know) so let's make up for that. She is Natasha (now guys stop drooling overthe name).

OK, now let me share the happenings of Natasha's life after we bade her good bye last time. Natasha just loved the place which she had found after days of struggle and spent the entire weekend enhancing its aesthetic value…an artist that she was….

A well placed black colour Bean bag was her favourite possession in the room. By the way did I mention that Natasha got a single room for herself and the room very well reflected her soul and identity after the redo; a space where she could be herself after the arduous hours of jostle with the outside domain.

Ahem Ahem.... don't worry I don't intend to turn this into any kind of a sermon…

After she settled down in her room, Natasha geared up for her first day in the new job. Her mind was thronged with an assortment of emotions…a li'l jittery thinking about her new role…a li'l excited about meeting new people…li'l bewildered thinking about coping with the language…with such thoughts on her mind Natasha slept off.

Her morning was welcomed with a loud bang on the main door of the flat. She tried ignoring it but dear that morning sleep is to people, nobody bothered to get up. So our lady pulled herself out of the bed and prodded towards the living room to open the door. She rubbed her eyes twice, thrice but couldn't find anyone on the door… ”I must be too sleepy” Natasha thought in her mind, but despite her continuous rubbing of eyes she couldn't see anyone outside the door.

"How strange and irritating people could be early morning" Natasha blurted out in irritation and tried pushing the door to close it. While doing so she looked at the floor and saw a hot case kept over a steel utensil right outside.

"Now what the hell is this?" She bent down to check the stuff inside. When she opened it she found Idlis and Sambhar in the utensils and after reeling in confusion for few minutes, it struck her that this could the breakfast for the morning.

"Is this how we get breakfast every morning?" a still skeptical Natasha asked one of her roommate who had also gotten up by then.

"Yeah every morning...and the best part is we don't even know if this is fresh for us or it has been tasted by dogs roaming around" Natasha shuddered at this comment of her roommate so much so that she immediately made up her mind to skip her breakfast…forever!!

Pushing this thought out of her head, Natasha got ready for the office and stepped out of her PG.

First day in the office appeared pleasant to Natasha until lunch time, when she was told that the office does not have a cafeteria for lunch. So like a falling deck of cards her ideate of a classy cafeteria in an IT company of Bangalore came tumbling down….psst psst…poor girl had to bear the trauma of No Cafeteria and No Conveyance in her company on the very first day itself..

No Conveyance…How did she travel to her office then? Well, she so much did not wish to stand at arm pit distance to anyone, that she preferred to enjoy the insanely bumpy rides of auto rather then commuting by BMTC a.k.a., public buses of Namma Bengaluru.

Little did she know that she would be mustering such amusing experiences in her routine travel by auto.

While one day an autowala shared a joke with her in the morning with a concern that after she goes to the office she would be all sucked up in the work, the other day an autowala gave her a long discourse on how important is to stand by the love of your life….of course this entire preaching was based on his autobiography! Not quite far behind was an autowala who took Natasha by surprise when he exhibited his up-to-date stock market knowledge despite his feeble financial health…and to spice-up this concoction was the autowala who said that he was a chef (!!) in a five star hotel in Mumbai and earned around 30k pm… (Whoever said education was important to mint money should be hiding somewhere now). It's a different story that he quit due to his silly mistakes but now was rearing to setup his own catering business. Completely inspiring dude !!

Our lady has come a long way since her inaugural adventure in the city…from initial irritation to getting used to the anecdotes…. Natasha has now learnt to enjoy this city and often feels nostalgic, about every single thing, on days when she is away from this chaotic and harebrained comfort of the people and the place, of soon to be named PG Valley!!